13 Replies Latest reply: Oct 26, 2009 4:15 PM by rantingrick RSS

    Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3

    rantingrick Community Member

      I have a heavily annotated document with a lot of long footnotes, often several per line and several lines per note. That creates layout issues because ID only wants to split the last note on the line. So if the last line of page 2 would have notes 17-19, and there's only enough room to get 17 and half of 18 on the page, ID pushes the whole line and notes 17-19 to page 3. That leaves a lot of whitespace on page 2.

       

      So to solve this, my idea was to create a note 17 that is formatted to look like notes 17-19, and then just bump up the note number by 2 so that the note following note 17 would be note 20.

       

      I can't find any way to do this. Any suggestions or alternatives?

       

      BTW, I probably will not have to do this too often in the document, but there are 2300 footnotes, so I certainly don't want to move to manual footnoting.

       

      Thanks

       

      Tom

        • 1. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
          [Jongware] Community Member

          Unfortunately, InDesign lacks all but the utmost basic footnote numbering options -- you can restart on any page or section, but only again at #1.

           

          I think you can "fake" it by inserting the start of note #18 at the bottom of note #17, then the remainder of note #18 in a note of its own somewhere at the top of the next page. Hide this note number by setting its text color to [None].

           

          The *huge* disadvantage is that it will go awfully wrong whenever your text reflows ...

          • 2. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
            David W. Goodrich Community Member

            Three long footnotes in one line of text?  Paraphrasing Emperor Joseph's remark to Mozart, you may simply have too many notes to run them at the bottom of the page.  Or at least too many long ones (one can trick ID into doubling up short footnotes).  End-notes really might make for a more readable design.

             

            David

            • 3. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
              rantingrick Community Member

              This is a critical edition and the original text is quite challenging to read without the annotation. Three notes per line is very uncommon, but it happens on the first few lines because the personnages are getting introduced. Though not ideal, the best solution I've found is to push one of the notes to the next page.

               

              Changing to endnotes would require even the most educated reader to flip to the endnotes three times per line. That's no solution. There would be rebellion in the ranks and shrieking and gnashing of teeth. I might get hung in effigy. Too risky. This is volume 5 in a series, and the series is from a family of series, whose format goes back to the 1950s, at least. I would really be messing with tradition.

               

              One volume in that series solves it by having notecalls on page 1 (well, page 21, but you get the idea - the page with all the names), and then p. 2 is just notes, and p. 3 is the balance of the notes and starting the text back up. I'd feel better about that if they were facing pages, but as this is the first page page of the volume, it will be an odd-numbered page.

               

              Anyway,  the format is not really up for discussion (except perhaps the idea I mentioned above). The question is how to get it to work. I did a previous volume in this series and just used WordPerfect to lay it out. It had all the features I needed - adequate adjustments for character spacing, kerning, leading and more. And it had a very simple feature that allowed you to increment a footnote.

               

              Sadly, WP also had the nasty habit of corrupting the files and causing data loss, so our project had to give it up and Word is nowhere near up to the task fo page layout, while InDesign can't match WP for it's ability to handle footnotes.

               

              Sigh......

              • 4. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                P Spier CommunityMVP

                I haven't tried this, but I wonder if just moving the marker to the next line and formatting it invisible, then adding a "fake" marker in the correct position would help? Not a good solution for future editing, but maybe in a pinch...

                • 5. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                  rantingrick Community Member

                  Sorry, Jongware, I missed your note.

                   

                  I think Peter and Jongware have a fully workable solution. Yep, it makes editing harder, but no harder than what I'm doing now.

                   

                  But it's a simple and workable soultion. I should only have to do this once or twice in the document and I'm not so worried about text reflow, because this is only an issue on pages 1-3. Once those are done, I'll just lock it in and cross my fingers.

                   

                  I should have been able to see that one myself, and I even thought about making the note call invisible, but I was stuck on leaving the notes where they were and creating "dummy notes" that with hidden note references, but then it would have the actual note to deal with.

                   

                  Your solutions are much better.

                   

                  Thanks guys!

                  • 6. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                    David W. Goodrich Community Member

                    Maybe this is old news by now.

                     

                    One of the ways you can fake things is with a footnote whose paragraph style has a leading of Zero; make the type size really small, color it paper, and you won't see it.  In fact, you will have to use the story editor to find the damn thing.  If you make the number for this note in the text really small and color it "paper, it, too, will disappear.  So this may allow you to fake incrementing the footnote number.

                     

                    I created an example seems to do what you need, and it is probably easier to attach that file than explain it; I used IDCS4, so I exported to INX -- I hope everything survived.  It shows 3 apparent footnotes in the last line of the main text, 17, 18, and 19.  Ftnts 17 and half of 18 look like they are on that page, but that first half of 18 is a fake added onto ftnt 17.  Ftnt 18 seems to continue in the footnotes on the next page along with 19, but these are fakes added above 20.  I colored the fake ftnt numbers so you can see them, but you will need the story editor to show the invisible ones.

                     

                    David

                    • 7. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                      P Spier CommunityMVP

                      I prefer to set colors to none rather than paper. It keeps things from showing up on top of a background.

                      • 8. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3Certainly "non
                        David W. Goodrich Community Member

                        None certainly is a better choice for color than Paper -- I must have lapsed into old PageMaker kludges.

                        • 9. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                          rantingrick Community Member

                          Thanks. I was using "paper" as the color. I'll change it, which makes sense - this will be printed on off-white yellow archival-grade paper, and I'd hate to have it try to match white paper or some such.

                           

                          I take it "none" means "just don't use any ink" which sounds better.

                           

                          What I did was use a style "Footnote Reference Hidden" so if it comes to it I can always search on that.

                           

                          I set the font size to .1pt, -100 tracking, horizontal scale to 1% and leading to 0. That seems to make it all but disappear and the final space ti takes up is less than the variability you get just because of kerning. So it's not too bad.

                           

                          Now I just have to see how few instances I can get away with.

                           

                          Thanks once again for your help. It all seems so obvious once someone explains it, but I was really in a quandry last night!

                           

                          Much appreciated.

                           

                          Tom

                          • 10. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                            rantingrick Community Member

                            Oops. I hit "correct answer" on the wrong post. I hope that doesn't mess up the way things get shown/listed.

                             

                            Oh well. Once again, I much appreciate the advice.

                            • 11. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                              P Spier CommunityMVP

                              rantingrick wrote:

                               

                              Oops. I hit "correct answer" on the wrong post. I hope that doesn't mess up the way things get shown/listed.

                               

                              Oh well. Once again, I much appreciate the advice.

                              If you meant to say mine was correct, it's no big deal. I have more than enough points.

                               

                              Paper means NO INK - let the paper stock show through - and it knock out anything behind it. It isn't really an ink or color you need to try to match to paper stock (though you can edit it to make your layout look closer to the truth if you plan on printing on colored stock). None, on the other hand, means DON'T ADD any ink or hide anything that might be behind, so it won't knock holes in photos or colored backgrounds. This is an important distinction that you need to learn.

                              • 12. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                                David W. Goodrich Community Member

                                The zero-height footnote paragraph can be a handy kludge for getting things to look as you intend in print, but it is not without consequences in the electronic world.  If there is any chance your opus will be published electronically, as a final step you might want to delete the contents of your "Footnote Reference Hidden" footnotes lest they confuse electronic searching and indexing.  ID doesn't care if a footnote is empty -- or perhaps just a single ASCII space -- and once you're done making pages hopefully you'll no longer need the kludge footnotes' contents.  Bear in mind that something like Google Books may end up scanning your tome, and your files will be more accurate than any OCR-ed version.

                                David

                                • 13. Re: Skip/Increment Footnote Number in InDesign CS3
                                  rantingrick Community Member

                                  Peter,

                                   

                                  Thanks. Understood on paper versus none. That's more or less what I was trying to say, but it hadn't occurred to me until the preivous discussion.

                                   

                                   

                                  David,

                                  Thanks for your heads up. In fact, my books are now in Google Books. My publisher wants a hard copy and a PDF and I know they have a contract with Google, so I suspect that tye give the PDF to Google and that is what the GB version will be based on.

                                   

                                  Frankly, I'm not sure I care that much. The zero-height footnote kludge will be used only in extremis only a few times in 500 pages, so I don't think it will be too much of an issue.

                                   

                                  As I'm sure you can tell, page layout is not my normal job. Once every two years or so, I do layout on a book because I'm willing, not because I'm qualified!

                                   

                                  So I do really appreciate all the help. I can't really return the favor here, but I moderate the Content Management forum over at Webmasterworld.com. If you have any questions about Wordpress or Drupal and such, that's where I *can* repay the favor, or at least pay it forward.

                                   

                                  Tom